Saturday, February 23, 2008

I couldn't even pluralize "dominator" because Nintendo won't let Sony in the door. Nintendo has the handheld game market locked tighter than Fork Knox. This won't be the first place to call out the "Apple is entering the handheld gaming market" flag, but I do think I can lay out the steps they would (or should) take that can lend credibility to the idea. If nothing else, I hope someone there is reading.

Apple can't do this alone, but they have a very good friend in another company with a name that starts with A: Adobe. The pair would be the ultimate contender into the very tight market and the approach is amazingly simple. Flash is coming to the iPhone and iTouch, and I'll hope they make bookmarking Flash games easy and give us the option to "fullscreen" them on the devices. Explicit offline caching wouldn't hurt either. The next step is obviously to allow flash apps and games to be installed directly for quick access and immediately the devices have an interactive media platform with an amazingly rich community of developers and user support.

Do we even need a separate device? The only thing needed would be upgrades to the lines that would probably happen anyway. More memory, speed, and storage are always nice. The touch could spawn some more sensitive actuators and allow some different control types.

The only mistake they could make here is to require any physical medium.

Outside of the physical aspects the entire approach just hinges on how they market the devices in the coming years and if they can price a model competing against the DS and PSP.